"The Northrup Gumman Foundation is accepting teacher applications for the 2010 Weightless Flights of Discovery program, a unique initiative that places teachers on micro-gravity flights to test Newton's Laws of Motion and energize students in the formative middle-school years. Middle-school math and science teachers in public schools are welcome to apply for the program."

"The United States has not adjusted to a new global marketplace where foreign countries and foreign companies have the ability to outpace their American counterparts. It’s not tenable for...[us] to continue with the status quo. In a world where innovation is critical to U.S. competitiveness, we must do everything in our power to optimize commercialization that stems from our nation’s vast research investments. This is an issue where the Commerce Department is working hard to find solutions.

Last fall, we launched the Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, whose mandate is to drive policies and programs that help entrepreneurs translate new ideas, products, and services into economic growth, and to accelerate technology commercialization of federal R&D.

And today, I want to announce that on February 24 [2010], this Office will host a forum with university leaders and key stakeholders on the roles of universities in innovation, economic development, job creation, and commercialization of federally funded research."

Locke's analysis is dead on and includes references to NASA, aerospace and public-private collaboration in commercialization. The emerging suborbital space vehicle industry is a classic example of what he and the Obama administration are strongly promoting and they surely support STEM education as a critical lifeline essential to feed such entrepreneurial innovations.

"Purdue University researchers are designing and building an experiment that will operate during a test flight of a new type of reusable rocket to be launched by aerospace company Blue Origin LLC. The experiment will be used to study how fluids behave in low gravity, providing information that could help engineers design better components for a variety of technologies used both on the Earth and in space, said Steven Collicott, a professor in Purdue's School of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

It is one of three scientific research payloads recently selected by Blue Origin to be carried to suborbital altitudes during a flight test of the company's New Shepard rocket. The rocket enables researchers to study phenomena that cannot be effectively observed on Earth or during the relatively brief low-gravity periods that can be created in aircraft flights."

"The killer app for private spaceflight, at least once the millionaires and celebrities have had their turn, may well be scientific research.

"You spark this industry with tourists, but I predict in the next decade the research market is going to be bigger than the tourist market," says Alan Stern, a planetary scientist at the Colorado-based Southwest Research Institute who is heading up a committee to link up researchers with future suborbital spaceflights."